The all-too-predictable dynamics surrounding a potential new Iran sanctions resolution in the United Nations Security Council continue to play out just as we have anticipated. As some commentators are leaping on media stories that one of China’s diplomats took part in a P-5+1 conference call yesterday about a possible resolution, The Wall Street Journal reports today that the Obama Administration is already backing away from a number of the “tougher” measures that it originally included in the current draft resolution, primarily to maximize chances for winning Russian support and Chinese acquiescence (at least) for a watered-down resolution. According to the WSJ,
“Among key provisions removed from the original draft resolution the U.S. sent to key allies last month were sanctions aimed at choking off Tehran’s access to international banking services and capital markets, and closing international airspace and waters to Iran’s national air cargo and shipping lines…The cargo sanctions initially named Iran Air and Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines and demand a blanket ban of their airplanes and ships from other countries’ airspace or territorial waters.”
As the WSJ points out, these measures “would have made it difficult for Iran to insure imports and exports of oil and other essential commodities, by barring foreign insurers from serving international transport contracts from Iran.” Other provisions deleted from the original draft text would “have barred Iran’s access to international capital markets by prohibiting foreign investment in Iranian bonds.”
According to the WSJ, the current draft still contains a prohibition against states offering financial assistance or credits for trade with Iran as well as a comprehensive international arms embargo against Iran. Furthermore, the current draft contains provisions specifically targeting the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. In particular, the current draft
“would force an international freeze on the assets of the entire Revolutionary Guard and ‘any individuals or entities acting on their behalf or at their direction,’ and on ‘entities owned or controlled by them, including through illicit means’…If enforced, the proposed sanctions could force the Revolutionary Guard to divest itself of some holdings to prevent major disruptions in the economy. The Revolutionary Guard’s affiliation with the country’s telecom operator, for example, could prompt foreign partners to stop connecting international calls.”
We would anticipate that some, if not all of these provisions would be watered-down or perhaps even eliminated before a final text of a new sanctions resolution could move ahead. Obama Administration officials remain relatively confident that they can win Russia’s support for a new sanctions resolution, but they will almost certainly have to give up more on the extent and rigor of the specific measures included in the resolution to guarantee Moscow’s backing. Russia, for example, has consistently insisted that proposals for an international arms embargo against the Islamic Republic be excluded from previous sanctions resolutions. Getting Beijing to abstain, at least, is essential for any resolution to move forward—and that, too, is likely to require more concessions on substance from Washington and its European partners. It seems unlikely that China (or even Russia, for that matter) would ultimately endorse a blanket prohibition on dealing with the Revolutionary Guard and U.S. Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey’s “hit list” of Revolutionary Guard affiliates and asset holdings—including in the Islamic Republic’s all-important energy sector.
And, of course, the United States and its European partners continue to face an uphill battle to get Brazil and Turkey (two of the Security Council’s most important rotating members) to support a new sanctions resolution against Iran. But this, too, will be necessary to get to what Obama Administration officials identify as their goal of a 14-1 vote in New York in favor of additional sanctions. (The Administration privately acknowledges that Lebanon is unlikely to do more than abstain.)
Looking ahead, the most probable endgame will play out along the lines we have anticipated: the United States and its European partners will get a new sanctions resolution, but it will be greatly watered-down from the measures they originally proposed. Moreover, the Obama Administration is likely to fall short of its goal of a 14-1 vote in the Council, which will mean that this resolution will be passed by a more divided Security Council than any of the three previous sanctions resolutions adopted against Iran. And, it’s much more likely to be June, rather than April, before we get there.
So what, exactly, is all of this going to do to advance U.S. interests? In an article this week in Time, Tony Karon recounts Secretaryy of State Hillary Clinton’s pledge to “prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.” Reviewing the state of play on international sanctions, Karon then argues that,
“The actual level of progress on the Iran sanctions front, however, has not yet caught up with Clinton’s tough talk — and there’s little sign that any of the pressure being mustered will realistically stop Iran from slowly acquiring the means to create a nuclear bomb (though the U.S. believes Tehran has not yet decided to actually build such weapons).”
The Obama Administration is still deeply in need of a serious Iran policy.
–Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett
Th mood in Tehran is that further UN sanctions will force the Iranians to respond and that ultimately the region is moving towards further instability and military confrontation. Everyone will lose, but the US will lose the most.
It’s amazing to see how animosity towards the US is increasing on almost a daily basis among Iranians both inside the country and even outside the country. If Obama wants to be hated as much as Bush, the current moves towards sanctions is getting him there pretty quickly.
Max Hastings. In FT March 27/28.
Fiorangela,
I agree with you that Iran is demonized by “supporters” of Israel, in order to distract attention from the continuing oppression of the Palestinians by the Israelis- – especially in the West Bank. Sir Max Hastinings has come good comments in the Financial Times today: “A deaf and defiant Israel is gambling with its future”. “Some day Americans will awaken to the heavy strategic price their own nation pays for indulging Israeli excesses.”
Mohammed, I agree that US legislators are deliberately and knowingly “punishing the Iranian people,” but, as Cyrus said, the nuclear issue is a pretext. I don’t believe that Americans know this, not even the American legislators who are casting the votes that they hope will cause harm to innocent Iranians. American lawmakers think they are forcing regime change in Iran. I suspect that that, too, is not the whole picture. I believe that the agenda that makes all the pieces of the puzzle fit — the restraints on banking, insurance, finance, gas, IRGC business concerns– as well as subversion of Iran’s rulers, is Israel’s determination to exercise hegemony over Iran.
Zionists never forget and never forgive: for Jews to have been a Persian satrapi is still a seething humiliation, one that zionism intends to redress by reversing the roles, just as zionism is ghettoizing and victimizing Palestinians in revenge. Israel is using American blood, money, political cover, and most of all, ignorance, to get what Israel wants: dominance in the Middle East, with Israel as the little empire/hinge between blossoming China and India, and Europe.
Sakineh asked how the West will lay pipeline across Iran if Iran is laid waste by Israeli/American bombs. Germany is investing in railways across the Arabian desert; Saudi Arabia is struggling to control Yemen, guardian to Red Sea ports; Germany is selling Israel submarines to patrol the Persian Gulf: the scheme is to shut out Iran and establish a Red Sea route to the Mediterranean.
Nukes are the pretext. The true goal is Israeli wealth and dominance over Iran’s resources, institutions, and human capital. Americans haven’t yet figured out that Israel will kick them under the bus sooner rather than later.
Jon Harrison:
I just saw your comment about Ahmadinejad is being an enigma to you. Apparently, there are great degree of accuracy with your comment. he has changed even Iran’s internal political dynamic radically with his unique leadership style. something few people could ever do in the history of modern Iran or the whole Mideast. however, I guess, you would know the explanation for his actions. you (probably) worked on the tumultuous politics of Mideast more than my whole lifetime so to know what it exactly means in the region to take an action like what Ahmadinejad does.
I remember, last year, a friend of mine, who we used to talk a lot about the similar subjects, asked me the same question. why should he go that far on the Palestinian issue? he could simply gather people in Iran for conferences for the cause of the Palestinians, advertise heavily and so on, if that is his intention. while these might be very pragmatic methods, there are, as you also well know, nonetheless not enough to turn the heat up to the stage he needed. in fact, Pragmatism is not a value, but rather the triumph of expediency over values. for what he wants to achieve, values (were)are needed. if you don’t talk to the extreme, you may not even be able to get the midway. the fact that he has been in that stage is because of what he said, otherwise, the Islamic of Republic of Iran was just doing those pragmatic approaches for years and nothing substantially happened. anyhow, with what we see these days, it seems, his approach is bearing the fruit. he can be vindicated at the end, as the end nears, I think.
I need to remind everyone that the sanctions having nothing to do with a nuclear weapons program — which is a pretext — nor do the sanctions proponents really care if the sanctions themselves are effective or not. The purpose of the sanctions are merely to act as another incremental step towards war (after all the sanctions proponents make little secret of what they expect will follow once the sanctions have proven ineffective, as widely predicted) and to “box in” the Obama administration to that eventuality, by making it ever harder for the US to really engage Iran. The farther we go down the sanctions road, the more difficult it will become to do a 180-degree turn and engage in any substantive dialogue with Iran. And that’s precisely the plan.
Jon Harrison,
The foolish American sanctions against Cuba have propped up the regime, and delayed the evolution into a more typical Latin American state that otherwise would have taken place.
Iran needs to cut back the gasoline subsidy, so sanctions trageting gasoline will enable the government to blame the west, and particularly the US.
WP just posted this drivel under “Israel could use tactical nukes on Iran: thinktank” calling for war. They just don’t get it that propagating this will cause deaths of millions of innocent people. Also, dropping nuke in the middle of Iran would render it un-passable for many years, so how is US going to lay the pipeline to carry Iranian oil to EU once they have control over the country? Or, will Iraq be the conduit for this?
Read more here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/26/AR2010032601354.html
@Fiorangela
Thanks for the link. I also have a feeling that the US is in its very literal sense ‘punishing’ the Iranian people for their support for the nuclear program.
While 93% of Iranians support the nuclear program (38% including production of nuclear weapons), 55% of Iranians are opposed to stopping uranium enrichment even in exchange for a lift in sanctions (which are deemed detrimental by most Iranians).
http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/brmiddleeastnafricara/640.php?nid=&id=&pnt=640&lb=brme
Several polls in the last few years have shown the same result.
I keep seeing these stats on websites from Real Clear Politics that say:
Obama approval rating: 48%, disapproval 47%
Congress approval rating: 17% disapproval 77%
Does this mean anything useful?
Obama Squeezed Between Israel and Iran
Israel rules, Washington follows
AIPAC arm-twisted members of the US Congress to sign a letter to the White House calling for the US to bypass the United Nations Security Council and unilaterally sanction Iran. And AIPAC also urged lawmakers to pass with no comments the annual US$3 billion US aid to Israel. This means the new made-in-USA F-35 fighter jets Israel buys will be basically financed by US taxpayers.
No surprises here. This is a congress that backed Israel’s assault in Gaza in late 2008 and condemned the Goldstone Report on Israeli atrocities in that conflict by a vote of 334 to 36. After all, the Democratic party depends heavily on very wealthy Jewish – and Zionist – donors for a chunk of its budget.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25073.htm
Have a Nice World War, Folks
Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, American missiles have been placed in four Persian Gulf states, and “bunker-buster” bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls in order to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia, from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of “defence” Robert Gates complains that “the general [European] public and the political class” are so opposed to war they are an “impediment” to peace. Remember this is the month of the March Hare.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article25081.htm
You know, let me qualify that last remark. At least in 1939 Hitler could be plausibly viewed as an “existential threat.” Not so Iran today. So I guess we have winner on the stupidity scale — the award goes to American policy toward Iran since the Islamic Revolution!
Good article and very thoughful comments. I agree with Eric that sanctions on banking, insurance, etc. are the most likely to hurt — assuming, of course, that everyone goes along with them.
Where is this business getting us? Cuba has been under a sanctions regume for 50 years. The average Cuban has suffered; the regime continues. If we assume that China and Russia will be basically de jure players only in any new sanctions regime against Iran, then the latter should do much better than Cuba has. It will have most of Asia plus Russia to draw upon for its needs. Why press key countries like Turkey and Brazil on this, to the detriment of our relations with them?. Again, the one area that might bite would be banking-insurance, where the US, EU, and Japan have enormous power. But even here I see the possibility of “cheating” by other powers.
So, with the lukewarm support (at best) of every important country in the world (France and the UK possibly excepted) we seek to impose sanctions that will injure the Iranian people but not change the Iranian regime. Looking over the period of Anglo-Saxon world supremacy, which stretches back 250 years (to the time the Peace of Paris, 1763), I struggle to find a more flagrant example of a stupid policy chasing a critical issue. Britain’s failure in 1939 to forge a Grand Alliance with the Soviet Union against Hitler, and then going to war for Eastern Europe anyway, comes to mind. But nothing else does.
In the absence of a coherent US policy vis-à-vis Iran, I would rather see sanctions rather than military action (as no is talking about other options). Yes, sanctions are meant to hurt the average person, not the elite and the moneyed. Sanctions will be watered-down in order to make them pass Security Council. However, any kind of sanction will bite the ordinary person in Iran. Sanctions alone, will not break Iran of it’s pursuit of being a nuclear capable (not nuclear weapon) country.
Pirouz,
I understand, and largely agree, but it’s the externally oriented sanctions — banking, insurance (especially on oil sales), overflights, etc. — that I have a harder time evaluating the impact of.
@ Mohammed: “The US officials are not sincere when talking about how much they care about Iranian people.”
not so, Mohammed; some of them are sincere– sincerely homicidal.
http://niacblog.wordpress.com/2010/03/05/mark-kirk%E2%80%99s-fuzzy-iran-logic/
“Kirk brushed aside concerns that a gasoline embargo will hurt innocent Iranians and stated that, in fact, the US should punish innocent Iranians as a means to engineer anti-government protests in Iran:
Q: The oil embargo or quarantine sounds like a very plausible alternative … why the opposition from the administration?
Kirk: Um, in a discussion I recently had with administrative officials they said we would feel worried that it would hurt the Iranian people… (laughs)
But it’s that actual pain that I think has to be imposed, in my view, a gasoline quarantine would immediately trigger anti-American demonstrations in downtown Tehran, organized by the regime.
But over time the regime fears large groups of people gathering because as you know a mob can turn very quickly.
When you hear that you can’t get enough gasoline that day, and you read in the state controlled paper that it’s Barack Obama’s fault, you’ll be mad at Barack Obama that week.
But as your factory closed down and as the refrigerator starts to run out, the naturally tendency of any people is turn to their own leader and say “fix this”.
I cannot feed a nuclear weapon to my family. It is more important to feed my family than eat nuclear weapons. And that’s the dilemma you want to put them in.”
Kirk was not the first US legislator to give voice to the goal of inciting riots in Iran on the notion that enraged Iranians would overthrow their government.
Ed Royce, Republican rep from Orange Co California, explained this logic in an appearance on C Span in Nov 2007 www dot c-spanvideo.org/program/200726-3
And Kirk is not original in formulating the thought that Iran’s leaders should be forced to choose between nuclear weapons and feeding one’s family. Ephraim Sneh introduced the concept in a speech at an AIPAC meeting in Washington, DC in 2008: www dot c-spanvideo.org/program/id/190205
Pirouz,
Sanctions inevitably spur onward domestic Iranian industrial development, etc. The effort to isolate Iran is to me the most abjectly foolish aspect of the US program.
Stupdity gets high marks in Washington, thanks to Aipac et al.
@ Eric A. Bill:
In the short run sanctions may make our nation suffer; but believe it or not in the medium-long run they help us! Instead of going after developing indigenous capabilities, our government will buy anything that it can from the international market.
However, when there are sanctions in place they are FORCED to go after R&D and the domestication of various technologies. Actually we owe a lot of our progress to AIPAC and pro-Israeli lobbies!
At this point I think Obama would be happy with appeasing the Senate, which passed an Iran sanctions bill on a voice vote after 5 minutes debate in early February. The last thing he needs is a joint resolution with a veto-proof margin or with a margin that would require using a lot of political capital to defeat.
At the end, the sanctions will hurt us more than everyone else, by ‘us’ I mean ordinary Iranian people. Ordinary businessmen will be hurt most. The US officials are not sincere when talking about how much they care about Iranian people.
I hope the Iranian government handles the domestic economy well; I really hope for the economic reform bill to overhaul the Iranian economy. If implemented carefully (which is, after all, a big ‘if’; Ahmadinejad is not particularly known for his careful handling of the economy) it will help us resist the sanctions and make them ineffective. A domestic growth engine can break the outside-imposed sanctions; in fact, I think it’s the only sustainable way of making sanctions ineffective.
I just wonder until when the US, Israel and European powers can claim that Iran is going to build a bomb. 2015? 2020? Will it be still believable by then? Will they be still able to talk of an ‘imminent’ Iranian threat? I find it extremely unlikely that Iran actually builds a bomb, given the very negative effects it will have.
The WSJ piece does concern me. I was much more optimistic when reading of Chuck Schumer’s call at the AIPAC conference yesterday for the US and Western Europe simply to “go it alone” on sanctions if they couldn’t get Russian and China on board. Had the US followed Schumer’s suggestion, it would have been a short time indeed before US manufacturers were complaining that all the widget orders were going to foreign firms. And, in the meantime, Iran could have bought all the widgets it needed. That’s no longer so clear.
Bravo, Fiorangela! Blocking the Conoco deal was an Aipac triumph directly contrary to the best interests of the American people. Stuart Levey is energetic, no doubt. But foolish in the extreme.
Keith Weissman, in the employ of AIPAC in 1995 when first sanctions were deployed against Iran, first, by executive order signed by Bill Clinton, then set into law — the Iran-Libya Sanctions act, 1996:
said Weissman in a conference on Iran held in Seattle, WA in December 2009:
“The sanctions hurt American interests more than they harmed Iran. Conoco, an American corporation, had to give up a contract they had made to develop Iranian oil fields. Conoco’s bid on that deal was not the most favorable to Iran, but Iran deliberately accepted the contract, in order to signal to the US Iran’s willingness to develop a relationship. If that contract would have gone forward, today, relations between the US and Iran would be on a far better basis. … The sanctions were passed under great pressure from my former employer, AIPAC. … Unilateral sanctions have never worked…. They are a waste of energy (energy in the sense of words and effort…)”
http://www.edmaysproductions.net/webvideo/irannuke.wmv
AIPAC agent says sanctions on Iran harm US interests more than they harm Iran.